What's Trending - August 2020
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Welcome to the What’s Trending blog! Every month, we scour the internet for the most exciting social trends, platform updates and consumer insights so you don’t need to. So grab a coffee (or a vanilla oat milk latte, or whatever), take a break and find out what’s trending this month.
Introducing Instagram: A time management company 🤳
- Clearly things have gotten out of hand. Instagram is rolling out features to better manage your time in the app, including a prompt that tells you when you have scrolled through all the latest posts in your feed.
- While you still have the option to view the older posts you might have missed, you can keep scrolling to view suggested posts from users you don’t follow, which is a real time saver.
- The new feature will also allow for more in-app advertisements, and will target product posts based on users’ past searches.
- Read more: Instagram rolls out suggested posts
Pack your bags and cancel your plans, Pinterest wants to get you travelling again 📌
- Have your travel pins been taking a back seat while you watch the world crumble before your very eyes? Not to worry! Pinterest is here to give you some travel tips and inspiration during a pandemic.
- They noted that searches for things like “cross country road trip” are up 89% and “road trips routes” have skyrocketed to 248%.
- Travel brands have taken notice, and are shifting how they promote travel on Pinterest. Think local getaways, day trips, safety concerns, and flexibility with bookings.
- Read more: Pinterest provides tips for travel brands
It's the hate speech, for me 💬
- TikTok is taking action to ban accounts with hateful content and has removed over 64,000 hateful comments following an update from the video platform.
- Reddit has taken a similar approach by rolling out an update to their content policy, which included banning nearly 7,000 subreddits that included hate speech. Since then, Reddit has seen an 18% decrease in hateful comments on the platform. So long, haters!
- Read More: Reddit updates content policy
Other Bites 🍴
- Facebook News is taking its talents worldwide. The social network’s news section will be expanding to the UK, Brazil, India, Germany, and France, because it did so well in the U.S.
- Can’t decide between Chef’s Table or Indian Matchmaking? Netflix’s new “shuffle play” button might be able to help you. The streaming service is trialing a new feature that will pick a show or movie just for you, based on your varying interests.
- With everything that has happened in 2020, dancing robots shouldn’t come as a surprise. Facebook has developed a new project that allows AI to create dance moves, and come up with routines based on musical input. Not for me, thanks.
- Did anyone else just find out that Facebook has a meme-creator app? No? Just me? Well, it’s getting some updates to simplify creation, discovery, and even adding group chats. What fun!